The industrial designer Brooks Stevens (right), who coined the phrase "planned obsolescence," made the Skytop Lounge car (above) in 1947 for the Milwaukee Road's Olympian Hiawatha train service.
"Although my phrase "planned shrinkage" will run a poor second to "benign neglect" in the unappreciated phrases derby," he wrote, "it will remain the most prominent label in the file of my government service".
The phrase "planned obsolescence" was popularized in the 1950s by the industrial designer Brooks Stevens, who intended it to refer not to building things that deteriorate easily, but "instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary".
Whereas many innovative concepts treated styling as an afterthought, Briggs & Stratton commissioned industrial designer Brooks Stevens – he of Willys Jeepster, Oscar Mayer Wienermobile and Evinrude outboard-motor fame, as well as the coiner of the controversial phrase "planned obsolescence" – to produce this design.
The phrase "planned obsolescence" gained popularity after an American industrial designer, Brooks Stevens, gave a talk with that title at an advertising conference in Minneapolis in 1954.
Sloan called this "dynamic obsolescence". The phrase "planned obsolescence" gained popularity after an American industrial designer, Brooks Stevens, gave a talk with that title at an advertising conference in Minneapolis in 1954.
The phrase "planned community" conjures up a lot of images -- maybe a swimming pool, obsessively manicured lawns, white picket fences -- but a farm is probably not one of them.
To use what is currently the hottest Beltway buzz phrase, plans for offloading the loot are not yet shovel-ready.
The agency previously has used the phrase when planning to sell a new bond the following day.
In the Chinese countryside, where, the saying goes, heaven is high, and the emperor is far away, the phrase "family planning" has taken on a sinister connotation.
